How To Steal a Car by Pete Hautman Page A

it.” But I still didn’t think I was really going to do it. I told myself something would happen. My other grandmother would die or there would be a tornado or something.
    That night when my dad got home from work, we had BLTs and baked beans for dinner—as minimal a meal as my mother was capable of preparing. I had thought she didn’t believe what I’d said about seeing Dad, but I could tell by the way she was acting that she did believe me. Maybe she’d seenhim herself, and seen the woman in the car too, but hadn’t wanted to admit it to me.
    As we were eating, my dad told a long story about something that had happened to him in college but I wasn’t listening. I was watching my mom. Usually she’s full of questions, always keeping the conversation going. Like And then what happened? or What did you have for lunch? or What were you doing way out by the Sofitel in the middle of the day?
    She didn’t ask him anything at all, the whole meal.
    I think she was afraid he would lie to her.
    After dinner, my mom cleaned the kitchen in that loud, potbanging sort of way she did when she was upset. My dad went into his study to shuffle papers around or whatever it was he did in there. I turned on the TV and watched an old Sex and the City rerun, except I wasn’t really watching it, I was thinking about how I was going to get out of meeting Deke.
    I had told him I would meet him at Charlie Bean’s the next afternoon, but I’d decided I wasn’t actually going to do it. The easiest thing would be to tell him I was sick, so I was trying to decide what kind of disease I should have—something that lasted a while—when the phone rang.
    My dad picked up the phone in his study, and I could tell from the tone of his voice that something bad had happened.My head went to all the usual places: another death in the family, a serious financial crisis that would force us to live on macaroni and cheese, a diagnosis of cancer or plague, a death threat from terrorist rapists—all the standard horrors. Then Sarah Jessica Parker’s heel broke at exactly the most embarrassing possible moment, and my mother turned on the garbage disposal, and all the conversations with Deke I’d been rehearsing kind of smooshed together and I thought how nice it would be to be bulimic at that moment so I could go to the bathroom and puke. Instead of puking, I turned up the volume on the TV and tried hard to care about Sarah Jessica Parker’s shoe crisis.
    What happened: Elwin Carl Dandridge got knifed.
    One of the other inmates thought that raping eight girls was sufficient cause for murder, so he stabbed him three times with the sharpened handle of a spoon. Apparently, it is not that easy to kill someone with a spoon, because instead of being dead, Dandridge was in the prison hospital. My dad felt he had to rush right over there to sit with his injured serial rapist and, I don’t know, write down his dying words or something. Actually, I think he was looking for an excuse to get out of the house, what with my mom acting so weird.
    He didn’t get home until almost midnight. I was slouched in his recliner, reading about Captain Ahab and his leg madeout of a whale’s jawbone, when he walked in and told me that Elwin Carl Dandridge was going to be all right.
    “His wounds were superficial. But he’ll have to be placed in solitary confinement when they release him from the hospital wing.”
    Like it was the best thing that could possibly happen, keeping the rapist safe.
    Then he asked me if Mom was still up, and I told him she’d gone to bed an hour ago. That seemed to make him happy too.
    The next morning when I got up, my dad was packing his suitcase. I had this stomach-dropping moment when I thought he was moving out, like they were getting divorced or something, but he told me my mom was driving him to the airport for an overnight trip to Colorado.
    “We’ve located a man who can alibi Elwin Dandridge for several of the alleged rapes. I’ve